Until reading a paper just now titled "
Quality Control of Silver Coins in
Antiquity" in the 1998 Metallurgy in
Numismatics, I was under the impression that all ancient Greek
contemporary counterfeits were
fourrees. George Varoufakis points out in this paper that the Athenian law of c. 375/374 BC referring to the
quality of Athenian silver coins mentions three classes of silver
counterfeits: silver-plated bronze core (hypochalcon), silver-plated lead core (hypomolybdon), and false composition (kibdelon).
Varoufakis says that
counterfeits in ancient times could have been made of a silver-copper or silver-lead
alloy. Presumably an ancient counterfeiter could have also used a lead-tin or a lead-copper-tin
alloy, tin being a metal they added to copper to make bronze. Using an
alloy composed of of a heavier-than-silver metal such as lead and lighter-than-silver metals such as copper and tin, it seems that an ancient counterfeiter would have been able to more closely approximate the
weight of a genuine all-silver coin than a silver-plated bronze
counterfeit (too light) or silver-plated lead
counterfeit (too heavy).
I don't remember seeing any ancient
Greek coins described as
ancient counterfeits that are of the false-composition
type. Is the reason for this that they're difficult to distinguish from genuine all-silver coins even today or that they're
rare compared with
plated ancient
fakes? The former would seem to be the more likely. Why should these kinds of
fakes have been rarely made in ancient times? The ancients knew how to
alloy copper and tin. Surely they knew how to
alloy copper and tin and lead. Anybody ever see one of these false-composition ancient
fakes of a Greek-era coin such as an
Owl or an
Alexander?
Fake Coins and Notorious Fake Sellers
